Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Two Readers Recommend This Book.

"The authors combine their thorough knowledge about incivility and workplace bullying with their deep insights into academic culture and changes taking place in the higher education sector. The result is an important wake-up call not only for policymakers and administrators, but for everybody working in academe."

—Denise Salin, researcher, Hanken, Swedish School of Economics and Business Administration

"Important, convincing, and deeply disturbing. Professors Twale and De Luca set forth the ways in which incivility has become systemic in academic culture and trace the history of this negative spiral."

—Sally Helgesen, author, The Female Advantage and The Web of Inclusion

"Faculty Incivility is a unique and courageous work by authors willing to 'tell it like it is' and dissect the conflicting agendas, arrogance and—yes—meanness that too often characterize their colleagues' behaviors. If this book were assigned reading for academicians, students, and even parents, the college campus might operate in very different ways."

From the Amazon review by Delar Singh:"In some departments, bystanders are aware of what is going on but usually do nothing to support the target (s) for fear of retaliation."

That's more or less the topic of my next post (under construction).

There is also a series of books by Kenneth Westhues on "mobbing" in the academic workplace. There is an extra wrinkle here in the self-image of academics as basically fair, rational individuals, incapable of subjecting colleagues to such shenanigans, unless somehow "they deserve it". I wonder if/why this type of behavior is on the rise...maybe it's related to the restructuring of universities as "businesses", when professors weren't looking.

I couldn't resist looking up "The Lecherous Professor" (so it worked). It's about sexual harassment.

What Was This?

College Misery was a dysfunctional group blog where professors got the chance to release some of the frustration that built up while tending to student snowflakes, helicopter parents, money mad Deans, envious colleagues, and churlish chairpeople.

Our parent site, Rate Your Students, started in 2005, and we continued that mission beginning in 2010. Ben at Academic Water Torture and Kimmie at The Apoplectic Mizery Maker both ran support blogs during periods when this blog had died.